The Competition – Part II

Now I’m going to tell you about dry cleaning, a method used by some carpet cleaning companies who compete to Oxi Fresh. Unlike steam cleaning, which tries to use a lot of water in order to break up and then suck up the stains, dry cleaning uses no or very little liquid. Instead, they rely on a scrubbing system. They use a machine called a “Spinning Bonnet,” that is supposed to break up the stains in the carpet and then absorb them. The idea sounds good in passing, but if you examine it closely, you’ll find major flaws.

The first problem with this professional carpet cleaning arises with the machine itself. The “Spinning Bonnet” is, in essence, a floor buffer with an absorbent pad attached to it. Floor buffers are excellent for cleaning floors – but floors like tile & grout, hardwoods, and linoleum. Why? Well, they scrub downwards and in circles, so they only work on flat surfaces. Because carpet has depth, though, the the bristles can’t clean the entire carpet. Their downward scrubbing motion only cleans the surface while compressing carpet fibers and pushing dirt and stains further down.

Then, the absorbent pad, which is meant to take up the dirt and stains, can’t do its job. With everything being scrubbed down and being compressed, it can only absorb dirt on the surface. If there is anything in the pile of the carpet, though, the pad can’t reach it. So those dirt and stains remain and, when the tech has to rake the carpet back up after the cleaning (due to the compression), those stains will slowly begin to reappear. Not what you want in your carpet cleaning services.

Such a system can get the surface of the carpet cleaned, but it fails to give a truly overall cleaning. I’ll tell you how Oxi Fresh Carpet Cleaning gives that sort of cleaning in a few days.